EA: DRM is a failed dead-end strategy

In an interview Frank Gibeau, head of their labels division of Electronic Arts, stated that digital rights management is a 'failed dead-end strategy' is. He also stated that DRM was not an intentional move for Sim City turning it into an online only game. He puts his foot down when it comes to DRM With the Sim City launch problems EA moved as fast as it could to rectify the situation, but some players felt EA's real intent was to force DRM on its customers. Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw's blog post seemed to only stir the pot, but EA Labels president Frank Gibeau now insists that DRM had absolutely nothing to do with the game's design whatsoever.

The following is an interview from gamesindustry.biz:

Speaking to GamesIndustry International at GDC this week, Gibeau commented, "That's not the reality; I was involved in all the meetings. DRM was never even brought up once. You don't build an MMO because you're thinking of DRM - you're building a massively multiplayer experience, that's what you're building."

Not only was DRM not a topic of internal discussion at EA, Gibeau said, but the executive also made it very clear that DRM is simply not an option for publishers anymore.

"At no point in time did anybody say 'you must make this online'. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience"Frank Gibeau

"DRM is a failed dead-end strategy; it's not a viable strategy for the gaming business. So what we tried to do creatively is build an online service in the SimCity universe and that's what we sought to achieve. For the folks who have conspiracy theories about evil suits at EA forcing DRM down the throats of Maxis, that's not the case at all," he said with a laugh.

For EA and Maxis, Gibeau said it really was a case of building a completely connected world with an MMO-like infrastructure.

"It started with the team at Maxis that had a creative vision for a multiplayer, connected, collaborative SimCity experience where your city and my city and others' were [working together]; for better or for worse, and for right or for wrong, the lead designers and the producers and the programmers felt like they wanted to tell us a multiplayer, cooperative city story around SimCity. We had built a bunch of these and you could've gone deeper and deeper into your plumbing and managing toilets and electrical posts, but we felt there was a bigger story to tell and a bigger opportunity to chase with an always-on connected experience built around that concept. That's what we set out to design and that's what Maxis created and brought forward into the marketplace," Gibeau explained.

"At no point in time did anybody say 'you must make this online'. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience and when you're building entertainment... you don't always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that's what we sought to achieve. If you play an MMO, you don't demand an offline mode, you just don't. And in fact, SimCity started out and felt like an MMO more than anything else and it plays like an MMO," he continued.

Gibeau acknowledged that EA probably should have done a better job in its messaging with the community, making sure that they understand the MMO nature of the title and the need to be always connected.

"I'm disappointed that we didn't do a better job communicating that upfront. I'm disappointed that we had a rough first couple of days in terms of underestimating how people were going to play the game and how the server infrastructure was going to hold up, but we responded the best we could, we got people to fix it as fast as we could," he said. "We had a majority of people come through who had a good experience and a bunch of people that didn't and that's not acceptable, but at the same time we tried to do make-goods with free games, we've been fixing and constantly tinkering with the experience and it's an experience that we want to continue to evolve over time. It has to be an online experience like an MMO where you bring out new events, new kits, new places to go, and that's more the vision for where SimCity is going."

Even with its problems, however, the game did quite well, selling over 1.1 million copies in its first two weeks, which Gibeau noted makes it "the fastest-selling and biggest SimCity we've ever built." Gibeau believes that part of the problem is the entire situation snowballed when the media started covering it.

"Some customers have had problems, and you're in the media; you know how some things can snowball, and unfortunately that's what happened here. We did the best we could in order to respond to that and made adjustments to the service but the game is continuing to sell through at a much higher expectation than we thought. The servers are now at 100 percent and there's plenty of capacity... and we're not the first or the last company [to have a problem like this] - Activision Blizzard, Steam, Ubisoft...everybody's had this problem and it was our turn I guess," he said.

#4564476 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:05 PM
I hate EA but I like Dice and battlefield series qqq there is no way to give my money to dice and prevent ea to pick it.

BLEH!
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#4564485 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:25 PM

I hate EA but I like Dice and battlefield series qqq there is no way to give my money to dice and prevent ea to pick it.

Suppose you could pirate the game (thereby denying EA money), and send a cheque/cash for the game's worth to the studio.

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#4564489 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:31 PM

Suppose you could pirate the game (thereby denying EA money), and send a cheque/cash for the game's worth to the studio.

It could be an option if it allows me to play online :/

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#4564493 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:34 PM

"At no point in time did anybody say 'you must make this online'. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience and when you're building entertainment... you don't always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that's what we sought to achieve. If you play an MMO, you don't demand an offline mode, you just don't. And in fact, SimCity started out and felt like an MMO more than anything else and it plays like an MMO," he continued.

I wish more of you understood this.

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#4564494 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:36 PM

I wish more of you understood this.

They're just talking out of their asses tbh. It's like releasing Chrono Trigger 2 and going WELP TIME TO MAKE IT ALWAYS ONLINE. Sense - it makes none. From what I've seen, no one really cares for the online featuers of SimCity anyway.

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#4564495 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:38 PM
I just don't understand Maxis at all. While I can understand them trying to innovate SimCity by offering a mulitplayer mode, I cannot understand why they thought it was a good idea to abandon the single player mode completely. That is what they've done essentially by adding the always-online DRM using the server for storing games on and forcing people to play the game differently. SimCity has always been a single player game and that's how it should remain IMO.

I have nothing against adding multiplayer modes (even though I have no interest in them) so long as there's a single player component there that hasn't suffered because of it. This new SimCity has clearly suffered from some major compromises as a result of being online: one, you can save locally therefore if everything goes tits up then you cannot revert to an earlier save. Two, the cities are now much smaller because of the forced multiplayer element. Three, the online DRM has resulted in a game where people had to queue up to play it even if they weren't interested in the multiplayer elements.

Basically, EA and Maxis messed this game up big time and I have no doubts that the game was made to be multiplayer so they could justify the always-online DRM. Blizzard did the same thing with Diablo III, only rather than multiplayer they insisted that the always-online element existed because of the Auction House (something which I never once used by the way in the 150 hours I played the game solo). That was also done to minimize piracy too undoubtedly and seems to have worked for Blizzard after a wonky start. I don't believe for one second that those EA SimCity meetings that Gibeau mentioned did not mention ways to prevent piracy and, thus, whether to use always-online DRM. I expect the massive success of Diablo III was on their mind throughout SimCity final development.

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#4564496 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:39 PM

They're just talking out of their asses tbh. It's like releasing Chrono Trigger 2 and going WELP TIME TO MAKE IT ALWAYS ONLINE. Sense - it makes none. From what I've seen, no one really cares for the online featuers of SimCity anyway.

To be honest? Honest how, what proof, why? This simcity is clearly, clearly designed at least as a very social game, if not an MMO. What he said is absolutely true, its obvious to anyone not blinded my ridiculousness.

And no, it would be like making Chrono Trigger 2 a multiplayer game where your friends all control their own character and you fight through dungeons and the story together, and then making THAT online only.

EDIT: Was it a bad to call to remove single player in a game where the single player fans are the basis of your fanbase? Absolutely. Does that make it "ALWAYS ONLINE DRM AND EA IS BAD AND **** U MAXIS"? No.

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#4564498 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:42 PM
"It started with the team at Maxis that had a creative vision for a multiplayer, connected, collaborative SimCity experience where your city and my city and others' were ; for better or for worse, and for right or for wrong, the lead designers and the producers and the programmers felt like they wanted to tell us a multiplayer, cooperative city story around SimCity."

This is probably true, but there is no denying that it was EA who saw an opportunity to include DRM easily in this vision. Otherwise there would be an option for offline play. It is extra work that no developer would like to do and it also increases server costs and brings related problems.

Darren Hodgson
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#4564499 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:43 PM

To be honest? Honest how, what proof, why? This simcity is clearly, clearly designed at least as a very social game, if not an MMO. What he said is absolutely true, its obvious to anyone not blinded my ridiculousness.

That's fine I guess if you go for that kind of thing but why strip out the offline single player completely, especially when it means much smaller cities and no local save options? That is a step backward IMO. SimCity has always been a single player game and to suddenly go to being an online multiplayer... sorry... social one is a bizarre choice IMO. What reason is there for not offering both an offline single player *and* an online social mode?

Always-online DRM aside, I would buy the game if it had a proper single player with local saves and larger cities but I am not interested in social gaming at all. Never will be so EA have lost a potential sale right there.

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#4564502 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:44 PM
To be honest? Honest how, what proof, why? This simcity is clearly, clearly designed at least as a very social game, if not an MMO. What he said is absolutely true, its obvious to anyone not blinded my ridiculousness.

And no, it would be like making Chrono Trigger 2 a multiplayer game where your friends all control their own character and you fight through dungeons and the story together, and then making THAT online only.

People getting locked out of the game at launch really helps the "it wusnt drm we promis!!" arguement. If it wasn't supposed to be "always on DRM" then why is it practically just that?

Would be more like you need to sign in before starting a new single player game of CT2 only to be denied access due to ****ty servers.

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#4564503 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:44 PM
That's fine I guess if you go for that kind of thing but why strip out the offline single player completely, especially when it means much smaller cities and no local save options? That is a step backward IMO. SimCity has always been a single player game and to suddenly go to being an online multiplayer... sorry... social one is a bizarre choice IMO. What reason is there for not offering both an offline single player *and* an online social mode?

Always-online DRM aside, I would buy the game if it had a proper single player with local saves and larger cities but I am not interested in social gaming at all. Never will be so EA have lost a potential sale right there.

Absolutely, they had a vision for it, and it was the wrong vision for their fanbase.

But that doesn't make them bad, or evil, or anything else the poor ****ing people have been called...It just means they made a bad call.

Would be more like you need to sign in before starting a new single player game of CT2 only to be denied access due to ****ty servers.

The idea is that there isn't a single player mode. Yeah, I know, dev console or whatever can enable a psuedo single player mode without a third of the game's features. It doesn't count. What they envisioned was clearly a game where cities were a collaborative effort.

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#4564508 Posted on: 03/28/2013 03:48 PM

This is probably true, but there is no denying that it was EA who saw an opportunity to include DRM easily in this vision. Otherwise there would be an option for offline play. It is extra work that no developer would like to do and it also increases server costs and brings related problems.

Exactly, having to keep servers running for a game is massively expensive and online games require constant maintenance and updating. It is why I find it so bizarre that there is no offline mode, which at least would have offered people who bought the game something to fall back on during those first two weeks of server issues.

And, EA, as we all know, are notorious for turning off servers after three years so who's to say they won't do the same for SimCity, just in time for its sequel? Once they turn off the servers then the game will be all but useless.

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#4564524 Posted on: 03/28/2013 04:10 PM
And this time, they will give us a BATTLE RECORDER

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#4564557 Posted on: 03/28/2013 04:59 PM
I don't get why it doesn't have an offline mode either, it just doesn't make sense to me other than for DRM purposes. Like you can play by yourself in the game, but it doesn't let you play offline which is really stupid IMO.